Arkansas native on the ‘real villains of Houston’

Billy Fleming, the Fort Smith native, former University of Arkansas student body president and co-author of “The Indivisible Guide,” has an opinion piece in The Guardian’s U.S. edition on the policy failures that have contributed to the death and destruction of Hurricane Harvey. Fleming has done research on Houston at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, where he’s getting his Ph.D. He’ll speak at the Clinton School of Public Service at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 6, on “Indivisible” and red-state resistance.

Houston has quietly become our fourth largest and fastest-growing city, due in large part to cheap housing. But the latter has come at an exorbitant cost to its safety. The swamps and wetlands that once characterized Houston’s hinterland have been replaced with strip malls and suburban tract homes.

Those landscapes once served as a natural flood protection system for the city. Research shows that, if they hadn’t been filled and developed, Harvey’s impact would have been lessened. Sam Brody and his colleagues at Texas A&M University in Galveston have been predicting an event like this for nearly a decade. That their work went unheeded by Texas policymakers should not be forgotten.

Worse, a generation of civic leaders have completely deregulated Houston’s land development market. In that process, they helped build a far-flung network of poor neighborhoods on top of a swamp. In Houston, there is a simple truth: the poorer you are, the closer you live to a petrochemical plant and the likelier your home is to flood.